The present invention relates generally to communication networks and more specifically to a system and method for developing Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and for supporting SLAs, using SLA templates.
As the world becomes increasingly reliant on the ability to obtain high speed data and voice communications, businesses have formed to provide various types of communication services. For example, Network Service Providers (“NSPs”) are in the business of providing network services, including Internet Protocol (“IP”) connectivity, simultaneously to many customers. Moreover, each customer of an NSP may have multiple sites which communicate with each other based on services obtained from the NSP. The services provided by NSPs include services based on the provisioning of Virtual Private Networks (“VPNs”) over networking resources under the control of the NSPs. These services are often private to individual customers. For example, through the use of VPNs, an NSP may simultaneously provide communication services to multiple client corporations over shared hardware equipment and communication lines owned or leased by the NSP. VPNs enable privacy between different customers of an NSP through assignment of private address spaces to respective individual customers of the NSP.
In business terms, NSPs endeavor to sell multiple, complex services in a highly competitive marketplace, based on price and features. As a result, NSPs must employ complex hardware and software infrastructures to support the feature rich services they offer, while remaining price competitive at the same time. In order to compete within such a framework, NSPs must keep costs, such as labor costs, as low as possible.
Generally speaking, NSP customers contract with an NSP to obtain various specific network services they desire through contracts known as Service Level Agreements (SLAs). In response to SLAs with various customers, the NSP must allocate the network resources necessary to satisfy each customer contract. Due to the high level of complexity in existing systems, developing useful SLAs, and provisioning network resources in response to SLAs, requires large amounts of time from highly trained, highly paid professionals. The costs associated with retaining such highly paid employees for this task contributes significantly to the cost structure of a typical NSP. Accordingly, the time of such highly trained professionals is very valuable, and should be minimized in order to improve the profitability of an NSP business.
For the reasons stated above, it would be desirable to have a system for provisioning network service provider resources in response to customer service level agreements (SLAs) that simplifies the steps necessary to develop SLAs, and to generate the information necessary to provision resources within a network the SLAs. It would further be desirable for such a system to incorporate VPN related constraints to be considered when processing an SLA to generate information used to provision resources in support of the SLA.